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What’s New in VoiceOver in iOS 11

On Tuesday, September 19th, Apple released iOS 11, bringing with it some new VoiceOver features and improvements.

Apps

You can now drag and drop apps using VoiceOver To do this, do the following:

While on the home screen, double tap and hold to enter edit mode.

Find an app you wish to move.

Set the VoiceOver rotor to”actions” if it’s not done automatically and flick up or down to “drag app name.”

Navigate to where you wish to drop the app and choose an option. You can drop an app before the app that the VoiceOver cursor is focused on, after it, or create a folder containing the focused app and the one you’re dragging. If you wish to drag more than one app, you can choose the final option. This is to “Add To Drag Session.” You can use this method do drag files from one app to another minus the double tap and hold.

Verbosity

VoiceOver includes several new verbosity settings you can now change. They are located by tapping Settings>General>Accessibility>VoiceOver>Verbosity.

These options include:

Speak hints. This setting is on by default. Double tapping this setting will turn them off.

Punctuation. After double tapping this option, you can choose to set it to all, some, or none.

Speak detect text. This determines whether automatically detected text in the focused item is spoken. For example: If you are on an app with an unlabeled button, VoiceOver will announce something like “Button. Possible text: View menu.”

Capital letters: This option will change what VoiceOver does when encountering a capital letter. You can choose from speak cap, play sound, change pitch, and do nothing.

Deleting text: You can choose from speak, play sound, change pitch, and do nothing.

Embedded links: You can choose from speak, Play sound, change pitch, or do nothing.

There is a table output heading with options related to the reading of tables.

You can toggle reading of table headers and row and column numbers.

As in iOS 10, you can turn the emoji suffix on or off, depending on whether or not you want VoiceOver to speak the word “Emoji” when one is encountered.

Mail

You no longer need to three-finger tap on a message to hear the preview.

When reading a message, you have VoiceOver actions to reply, archive, flag, mark as read/unread, and to activate.

If you use threaded messaging, you have a rotor option, “Expand/Collapse Thread”. When expanded, you can manage all of the messages inside a thread on an individual basis.

Smart Actions Rotor

VoiceOver in iOS 11 now has a new feature that allows for the user to continue to use the last used actions rotor item. This is useful for deleting large amounts of messages. This feature also appears in the App Switcher

What have we missed?

Know something that is not on this list? Please let us know by emailing us at feedback@iaccessibility.net or tweet us at @iaccessibility1

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About Jason Earls (Member of iA Staff)

Hey there, thanks for stopping by.
I hope you're enjoying all of the great content we have here.
Things I love:
Music? Check. Technology? Check.
I started getting into technology a bit later than some. I started using Windows in 2003 or 2004, until 2010.
After that, I ended up getting a Mac, and have been using OS 10/macOS ever since. I am also a member of Apple's public macOS and IOS beta programs. I’ve played with Ubuntu, but I haven't really delved into it. One of these days, I'm going to get a box, and start learning it for real. I've also used Android up to Kit-Kat. I love to learn and help people, and just have a good time.